Saturday, July 6, 2013
Palace, Manchester; Globe; Rose Lipman Building, LondonManchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a c…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMMonday, July 1, 2013
Theatre Royal Drury Lane, LondonToo static, too visually blaring, too short on tunes, too mechanical, too unimaginative. I have not disliked a whopping show so much since Chitty Chitty Bang …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00AMSaturday, June 29, 2013
Minerva, Chichester Festival TheatreAccording to David Edgar, the coalition is a bit like Ikea. Yellow and blue and hard to put together. And the Tory party manifesto is done up to look like…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, June 22, 2013
Noël Coward; Donmar; Royal Court, LondonThe Michael Grandage plan is working. Stars and cheap tickets are bringing new audiences to his West End season, with 25% of the tickets going to fir…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMIt's high time we dragged theatres into the 21st century by introducing some long-overdue changesLast week, I suffered an unwelcome theatrical first. In 16 years as the Observer's theatre cr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMSaturday, June 15, 2013
Dundee Rep; Olivier; Old Vic, LondonIt's hard to believe that the National Theatre of Scotland has been going only seven years. In an age of free-floating, out-of-building theatres, this com…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, June 8, 2013
Lyttelton; Globe; Young Vic, LondonThe postcodes at the top of this column tell a theatrical story. The South Bank is the new West End. Over the past 10 years this strip has become essential…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, June 1, 2013
Almeida; Hampstead, LondonRupert Goold doesn't take over as artistic director until August, but already there is a glimmer of him at the Almeida in this joint production with his Headlong co…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, May 18, 2013
Young Vic; Park theatre; Trafalgar Studios, LondonIn the past year the Young Vic has staged a whirling Doll's House and a Three Sisters that danced to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Now …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMSaturday, May 11, 2013
Directed by Michael Rosen, this year's Brighton festival captures the spirit of the city, from militant circus to missing relativesThis is the year the Brighton festival took off. The shows …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMSaturday, May 4, 2013
Globe, London; Minerva, Chichester; Donmar, LondonColin Morgan from Merlin is Ariel, bringing his smooth magic to the South Bank. Limber, honey-voiced, swinging from a lintel, he is eerily s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 27, 2013
Olivier, LondonThese days it's becoming hard to write about the theatre without praising Nicholas Hytner. Can't he do something wrong so that we critics can start looking less like courtiers…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMBattersea Arts Centre, LondonLittle Bulb is the cause of big joy. The larky, lyrical company, most of whom graduated from the University of Kent only five years ago, have taken over BAC with…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 20, 2013
The Shed; Lyttelton, LondonNicholas Hytner's departure is not the only change under way at the National. By the time a new artistic director arrives in 2015, large swaths of the once controv…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:08PMNuffield, SouthamptonWe're living in an era of strong and radical Chekhov productions. We've had them from Benedict Andrews at the Young Vic, Russell Bolam at Southwark, Andrew Hilton a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 13, 2013
Royal Court, London; Royal Exchange, Manchester; Phoenix, LondonIt's a tribute to Nicholas Hytner's mighty reign at the National that the news of his standing down outshone, or outdarkened, …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, March 30, 2013
Noël Coward; Royal Court, LondonJudi Dench begins tight as an oyster, encrusted with age and depression and disappointment. She opens and lightens and unstiffens as she remembers the dance …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:05PMSaturday, March 23, 2013
Women are finally getting the chance to make a massive impact in the arts, argues the Observer's theatre criticThis is the difference that a woman at the top of an arts organisation can make…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:06PMSaturday, March 9, 2013
Gielgud, LondonWell, I didn't believe in it but I was seduced by it. At least for a while. The Audience – the first surefire, unstoppable hit of the year – has been created to disarm all…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMButetown, Cardiff"People think we're pirates but we're actually poets." Welsh Somalians living in Cardiff's Butetown – the docks area once known as Tiger Bay – wanted to show the truth o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, March 2, 2013
Theatre Royal, Bath; Donmar Warehouse, London; Tobacco Factory, BristolLet's forget AA. Let's not put African American in front of August Wilson's name. Instead let's acknowledge that he was…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, February 16, 2013
Viaduct, Halifax; Stratford East; Roundhouse, LondonShe wrote under initials so that no one would know she was a woman. She died thinking her playwriting career was a failure. In New York sh…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, February 9, 2013
Young Vic; Somerset House; Almeida, LondonFeast: yes. But fast, too. I've rarely seen anything so bursting with visual ideas, so thrumming with interesting sounds and rhythms and so skinnily…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, February 2, 2013
Harold Pinter theatre, LondonIt looks like a wheeze at first, a publicist's gamble to get people to pay twice for the same evening. Yet the double casting of Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Wil…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMLyttelton, LondonA new version of A Doll's House, an updating of Ubu Roi, a triumphant, West End-bound adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Before that: wild swer…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMWyndham's, LondonAt first the casting of Rowan Atkinson looks perverse. In fact it's inspired. The truly startling stroke in Simon Gray's 1981 play is that it makes its main character a void…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMSaturday, January 26, 2013
Royal Exchange, Manchester; Hampstead; Tricycle, LondonWith what varied meanings the word "pals" winds through Peter Whelan's 1982 play. This is a drama full of warmth between both women and…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMFrom the Foxes to the Redgraves, the Observer's theatre critic Susannah Clapp chooses the most celebrated acting familiesSusannah Clapp
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:00AMSaturday, January 19, 2013
Royal Court; Trafalgar Studios; Platform; LondonPolly Stenham's feral families are at the heart of Dominic Cooke's Royal Court. First, in 2007, the bullying child and alcoholic mother of Tha…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, December 29, 2012
Discover Children's Story Centre; Cottesloe; Little Angel; LondonLong before the Olympics there was drama in London's Stratford. It was here in the 50s and 60s that Joan Littlewood and her e…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, December 22, 2012
Crucible, Sheffield; Trafalgar Studios; Battersea Arts Centre, LondonI thought my resistance to My Fair Lady had hardened. I don't like plays sentimentalised by melody, or cockneys singing w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:09PM 
